We are in beta stages of completing our online multiuser role-play platform. “The Training Room” offers an environment where trainers can define there own on-line role playing scenarios and provide the opportunity for learners to apply factual knowledge and to gain experience through the digital world. Trainers can define new games or adopt and modify sample games without any programming skills. The platform provides a variety of communication means within the scenarios; players can communicate with the use of discussion forums, text and voice chat modules as well as through multi-user video conferencing. An important feature of this product is the collaborative learning design, which allows participants to exchange information as well as to produce ideas, simplify problems, and resolve the tasks. In this product, the teacher is the active partner, moderator and advisor of the educational process.
The teacher or instructor defines the overall game theme, creates a new scenario or adds to an existing one, defines the teams, and enrolls the players. Playing time can fluctuate from several days to several weeks or longer and depends from the difficulty of the theme and basic skills of the students. In the game, basic stages can be distinguished as follows: role assignment, teamwork and team preparation time, general discussion, consensus voting, student feedback, and discussion of the game in the debriefing room.
Version 1 of the platform was written in Flash (AS2) and the demo can be viewed on the game design campus website. Version 2, which will be avaliable shortly, is written in Flex using actionscript 3. Flex provides more programming flexibility for me and a more professional look and feel for the user. The multiuser whiteboard has been enhanced, as has the multimedia forum. There is also a complete admin tool to allow trainers to create their own scenarios, modify existing ones, and control the game (or allow it to run by itself).